Old Spitalfields Market is a covered market in Spitalfields, just outside the City of London. It is in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. There has been a market on the site since 1638 when Charles I of England gave a licence for flesh, fowl and roots to be sold on Spittle Fields - which was then a rural area on the eastern outskirts of London. After the rights to a market had seemingly lapsed during the time of the Commonwealth, the market was refounded in 1682 by Charles II in order to feed the burgeoning population of a new suburb of London. Market buildings were sited on the rectangular patch of open ground which retained the name Spittle Fields: demarcated by Crispin Street to the west, Lamb Street to the north, Red Lion Street (later subsumed into Commercial Street) to the east and Paternoster Row (later known as Brushfield Street) to the south. The existing buildings were built in 1887 to service a wholesale market, owned by the City of London Corporation. Spitalfields Market was extended westward to Steward Street in 1926, destroying the northern extensions of Crispin Street and Gun Street in the process.
The original wholesale fruit and vegetable market moved to New Spitalfields Market in 1991.
Being at the centre of a revival in the area, the eastern end of Spitalfields retained its old charm in the Horner Square and Horner Buildings, which are Grade II listed buildings.
[From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]
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